All Penguins Are Cute, But Some Are More Cute Than Others

Abigail W. Leonard | February 02, 2007 04:14am ET

After the movie "March of the Penguins" came out, many conservative groups cited Emperor penguins as role models for monogamy. While it's true that these flightless Antarctic birds pair up to copulate and raise young, they only stay together for one mating season, after which they normally switch partners.Credit:

It could be their immaculate fashion
sense or maybe it's that sweet, wobbly gait, but there's no denying penguins are, well, adorable.
Like the rest of their cuddly class--the pandas,
koalas,
seals
and bunnies--they
help sell greeting cards and animated movies by tugging at our heartstrings.

But research shows our fondness for particular animals could have detrimental
effects on preservation efforts. These so-called "glamour animals"
dominate fundraising campaigns and news headlines, siphoning money away from
more needy--if less photogenic--creatures, according to some experts.

Now
scientists say that even within the cutest populations, we still play
favorites.

David
Stokes, a conservation biologist at the University of Washington, sorted penguin species by looks
into what he called "morpho-species" and found that certain groups were
overrepresented in popular photography books, a.k.a. coffee-table books. With
greater "photograph area," these penguins showed up more frequently and in
larger pictures--the Paris Hiltons of the avian set.

"The really
striking thing was that even though the species we looked at were really
similar, there was a consistent difference in how much we saw each one,"
Stokes told LiveScience.

A
question of color

The
research, which is published in the online edition of the journal Human
Ecology, took into account logistical issues such as population size and
accessibility of each group's habitat
to humans.

Once they
determined that the most popular was the Emperor Penguin--the same birds that movie-goers saw slide
across the icy grades of Antarctica
in "March
of the Penguins"--Stokes and his colleagues wondered what might make the
flightless birds so attractive to us.

Of all
the variables, including size and neoteny (the retention of babyish traits),
warm colors were the only significant determinant of how often the birds
appeared in the coffee-table books. Penguins with dabs of yellow or red on
their otherwise two-tone bodies were the most prevalent.

Stokes
worries the findings could mean that birds most in need of protection won't get
it. And in fact, a type of endangered penguin that does not have colorful
markings received very little coverage in the books.

"Our
preferences are not necessarily going to be sufficient guides to what we want
to protect," Stokes said.

Short end of the stick

Past research has shown that lack of human interest in an animal
group can result in decreased funding for its protection.

In a 1998 issue of Conservation Biology, Czech et al. found that
"advantaged subjects," including birds, mammals
and fish, were under the
protection of significantly more nongovernmental organizations. The allocation of benefits from the U.S.
Endangered Species Act were similarly skewed.

So the next time a rotund panda or brightly colored parakeet
catches our eye, Stokes hopes we consider other animals that lack such
sweet-looking faces--or, as with snails,
moths
or worms,
that have no faces at all--but still need our protection.